Teams at the Spring School

How to stop the invasion?

After hearing our alien stories, you are probably wondering: Are there aliens around my area as well? And what can I do to stop them? We therefore want to dedicate this blogpost to a couple of actions every one of us can take to identify potential invaders and avoid their spreading.

At first, we want to call your attention to the DAISIE-project, a site dedicated solely to the alien species of Europe with an astonishing 11.000 alien species documented so far. They offer a lot of information on all kinds of biological invasions and provide access to species databases for every region of Europe. You can check out the “Invasive species of the week”, get in touch with international experts and report sightings of alien species. They even compiled a handbook of the invasive species of Europe. The DAISIE-project can be found under the following link: http://www.europe-aliens.org/

Once you have informed yourself, you can follow these simple steps to stop aquatic hitch-hikers:

Check & clean your equipment, boat or fishing gear before transporting it to a different area

Another thing: Science is all about collaboration and we are working closely together with our amazing colleagues here at the research station. As they are using other sampling methods and different equipment, we get access to organisms from areas of the bay where we could not search ourselves as well as organisms from deeper waters. Without their help, we would not be able to get such a broad and clear picture of the organisms living in the bay. We want to take the opportunity to say: Thank you so much, guys! You are amazing!

So remember to inform yourself and Check, Clean, Dry and you can easily avoid giving a ride to those nasty aliens.

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